A big victory for conservatives over Christianism in New Hampshire.

There's an engrossing discussion of Kevin Phillips' new book over at TPM Cafe. I found this comment by Phillips interesting:

"When Bush was at the City Club in Cleveland on Monday, someone in the audience cited my book  and asked whether Bush would comment on how he felt about the relevance of the Apocalypse to the current-day Mideast. He spent five minutes evading the issue and the word. He has to. If he has to talk about these things, he'll lose a lot of people,  and if he ducks, true-believers may start to wonder."

One of the great failings of the MSM is that they simply do not understand the religious and theological underpinnings of the Rove Republican party. Some are beginning to catch on; but a lot of it has to do with a lack of religious or theological training and expertise among many journalists. Even those of us who do have a background in theology can miss a lot. As a Catholic, I've had to do a lot of reading on American evangelical Protestantism to get even a rough grasp of what it's about. Even now, I miss many nuances, I'm sure. But reporters don't have to know everything; they just need to ask questions. Why doesn't someone ask Bush whether he believes in the Rapture or what he thinks of the "Left Behind" series? Why not ask him how his Christianity is reconciled with his own administration's embrace of "water-boarding" as a "coercive interrogation technique"? Many in the MSM are biased liberals; many do their job well; but many more simply don't have the background to ask the right religious questions. It's homework time.

That was what ABC News' Jake Tapper tried to do. And then tragedy struck. This is gripping footage.

(Bad link now fixed. Sorry.)

A reader makes one early suggestion:

You made a good start, and I applaud your efforts. Another area where I think major savings could be made is in the area of health care. Indeed, the available evidence suggests that if the United States were to replace its current complex mix of health insurance systems with standardised, universal coverage, the savings would be so large that we could cover all those currently uninsured, yet end up spending less overall. That's what happened in Taiwan, which adopted a single-payer system in 1995: the percentage of the population with health insurance soared from 57 per cent to 97 per cent, yet health care costs actually grew more slowly than one would have predicted from trends before the change in system.
That would also help us to deal with the pain of the other middle class entitlement cuts which are bound to come.

I've long feared universal health care but there are good and bad ways to do it. I'm certainly open to the idea that we may be reaching a point at which the inefficiencies of our current system may require cutting the Gordian knot. Mitt Romney's idea of mandatory insurance, subsidized by government, is interesting. I'd like to sever the link between employment and health insurance. But I don't want to go to a British-style system. Trust me, I experienced it.

I'm trying to absorb this post from Kevin Drum, and this rather nasty accusation from Yglesias. In order to right our fiscal mess, I proposed means-testing social security, scrapping the Medicare prescription drug entitlement, extending the retirement age, and so on. Drum then makes the point that he's talking about actual government programs, i.e. discretionary spending, not entitlements. So he claims that the government will save nowhere near enough by my proposals. And, in that respect, he's right. But he wants to set the ground-rules by eliminating from any consideration by far the largest bulk of our unfunded liabilities! No fair. If entitlements are sacrosanct, of course you're going to have to raise income taxes or payroll taxes, by a whopping amount. And I'm sure Drum and Yglesias and others cannot wait to do so in some form or other.

My whole point is to put middle-class entitlements on the table and to cut them substantially. Even though you may disagree with it, that's not a free lunch, and it's deeply unfair to claim it is. It's also designed to protect the really needy. It's interesting, though, that the big government left is so hostile to small government conservatives. It's as if they really don't believe we exist or are sincere. But we do and we are. We have yet to see what an honest direct attempt to argue for real entitlement cuts would do to our current political debate, because almost no politicians are ballsy enough to propose them. My hunch is that the American people would be prepared to make serious cuts in middle-class entitlements to save our fiscal standing. At some point, of course, they'll have no choice. Responsible conservatives will tell them that now. Or raise their taxes. Which is it going to be?

Update: In Kevin's defense, we may be writing past each other. In my original post, I wrote about balancing budgets. What I meant was addressing our underlying fiscal imbalance; not balancing the budget for the next fiscal year now. My original term was perhaps too vague and subject to misunderstanding. But I hope it's clear what I meant now. And I'm certainly not trying to be dishonest. Au contraire. I'm trying to keep conservatives honest about what keeping the tax cuts would realistically require.

Here's a thought. I have plenty of conservative readers who are disgusted with the current GOP spending binge. Some in the blogosphere have launched a perfectly admirable anti-pork campaign. But we all know that's peanuts. I've laid out a rough and ready spectrum of cuts I'd be happy to make to get us to long term balanced budgets. I've linked to an expert study. But what would you be happy to give up? Do you have some bright, new ideas to save money? Which entitlement programs would you slash? Email them to me with the content line "What I'd Cut" and I'll happily post the most trenchant or interesting. It behooves those of us who still count ourselves as small-government conservatives to make the case. God knows most Republicans won't.

Glenn Reynolds endures the same pounding that I've been getting.

My most recent Sunday Times column is now available, as in olden times, in a little box down on the right, called "Latest Essays."

A reader channels Victor Davis Hanson:

"I believe that if you compare the conduct of the Iraq war by the Bush administration with the record of Lincoln during the Civil War and Roosevelt during World War 2,  the record will show that Bush is doing a better job than either Lincoln or Roosevelt.

Check out 'Battle Cry of Freedom' by James McPherson, a history of the Civil War era.  Lincoln faced continuous vilification by the Democrats and did not think until late in the campaign that he would win re-election.  The Union military during the Civil War lost dozens of major battles and suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties due to incompetence and bad decisions going all the way up the chain of command to Lincoln.  Reading 'Battle Cry of Freedom,' you realize nothing ever changes, and that Bush is doing better than Lincoln when the two are compared.  The confederate raiders like Quantrill were as bad or worse than the insurgents operating today, and Lincoln’s suddenly changing the reason for going to war, from saving the union to freeing the slaves, was as controversial and criticized as the decisions made by Bush. The critics in 1862-1864 ridiculed the idea that slaves could be made free men, even as critics today ridicule the idea that Arabs can have a modern democratic government.

Ku Klux Klan terrorists were active in the post Civil War south to such a large extent that President Grant, 1869-1877 kept large numbers of federal troops in the South and needed to conduct fairly large military campaigns against the Klan.  When President Rutherford Hayes withdrew federal troops from the South as part of his deal with the southern states to win the presidency, the KKK was able to terrorize and keep black Americans deprived of their civil rights until the 1960s.  Even though the remnants of the confederacy were still fighting 100 years after the civil war, Lincoln is not regarded as incompetent for failing to prevent the depradations committed by the KKK.

In World War II, the US marine corps suffered major casualties at Iwo Jima and Tarawa because of bad planning and leadership, on even simple matters of sending in reinforcements and pre-landing bombardment. Hundreds of army soldiers drowned in a D-day practice landing because their backpacks were too heavy. The Army suffered heavy casualties at Omaha beach on D-day because it was not scouted properly. The Army was undermanned at the battle of the Ardennes in 1944 because the USA deployed 100 fewer divisions than the planners said was necessary. The lines were stretched so thin because of the shortage of infantry that the Germans successfully broke thru during their 1944 winter offensive, Bradley and Montgomery gambled that the germans would not attack in the Ardennes sector.

When the Soviet Union occupied Eastern Europe after WW II, Roosevelt (and Truman) were blamed for awhile for not preventing this in the aftermath of the war. In addition, communist governments took over in China, North Vietnam, and North Korea, as a result of the destruction of pre-existing dictatorships in Japan and Germany. Even though Roosevelt failed to plan against the communist takeovers in Eastern Europe, China, Korea, and Vietnam, he is not considered incompetent.

I would argue that by any fair, realistic comparison with past wars, the Bush administration has run the Iraq war with a minimum of American military and Iraq civilian casualties, and has accomplished as much as Lincoln or Roosevelt accomplished in their wars. The news media of the time never complained about America firebombing Japanese and German civilian populations."

(Photo: David Burnett for Time.)

John Tierney has an excellent (TimesDelete) piece in the NYT today on the inexcusably negligent post-war planning for the Iraq occupation. Money quote:

"Two months before the Iraq war began, David Kay reported to the Pentagon for a job in the agency being formed to run postwar Iraq. Kay, a former Defense Department scientist and weapons inspector in Iraq, was supposed to oversee the police.
He assumed this meant preparing for the looting and crime to be expected when any regime collapsed. But those problems didn't seem to be on anyone else's mind, he told me, recalling his first day on the job.
'I said our first priority should be to establish order quickly, but that was considered a peripheral issue,' he said. 'The attitude was that it's not a problem, and if something happens the military will deal with it. I had one of the worst feelings ever in my gut, that this was going over a cliff.'"

Kay was one of many who urged some kind of force to prevent the rampant "industrial strength" looting (I'm using Bremer's words from his book) that continued long after the initial invasion. The looting included arms sites, and weapons that were subsequently used to kill Americn troops and innocent Iraqis. People urged a police effort long before the war, immediately before the war, and they urged it immediately thereafter. In the ensuing anarchy, they kept asking and asking. And Rumsfeld's response was: "stuff happens." How are any of us supposed to have confidence in recallibrating this war when we have this buffoon still running it? The president keeps making speeches about how he is adapting to make progress on the ground. No doubt, some fine people are indeed making progress and they merit our firm support. But nothing the president can say in trying to restore confidence in this effort would be as effective as getting rid of the obstinate, arrogant incompetent who has brought us this "unbelievable mess". Fire Rumsfeld now.

I'm just back from a panel discussion at Columbia on the Iraq war. I was out-classed by my fellows: Victor Davis Hanson, Ken Pollack, Joe Klein and Noah Feldman. The crowd was large but not too hostile. The general atmosphere was one of intense sadness at so much incompetence after so much potential. I learned a few things. I was not as aware as I should have been about how much Iran now controls the Ministry of Interior in Iraq; which makes dealing with them all the more necessary. Noah, Ken and I remain at some level befuddled by what can only be called the irrationality of the Bush administration's policies. I'm still amazed that, according to Joe, there are six times as many analysts devoted to China in the D.I.A. as devoted to Iraq. I'm still staggered that, despite insistence from Bush appointees on the ground, the administration refused to provide more troops when they were desperately needed. I still find baffling the enormous gap between the stakes the president enunciated and the casual, on-the-fly, on-the-cheap way in which this war was waged. I can see why it might provoke conspiracy theories and paranoia. I have come to the provisional conclusion that it is a function of the president himself. He is interested in the grand idea but utterly bored by its execution. He is also incapable of good management. The more you read about the screwing up of Iraq, the more you see that a lot of it was due to internal administration squabbles that the president was unwilling or too personally uncomfortable to resolve. He seems terribly awkward in the face of complexity and difficulty, of grappling with his own errors, as if he can simply will them away, rather than actually grapple with them. 

I found out that John Kerry focus-grouped the question of whether he should bring up Bush's legalization of torture in the presidential debates. I discovered (and should have known) that VDH opposes torture and supported the McCain Amendment. Feldman believes that the law itself was riddled with loopholes. VDH still won't criticize this administration. His response to every factual elaboration of staggering ineptitude is to point to other wars and larger errors. At this point, the only thing defenders of Rumsfeld can do is direct attention elsewhere or sigh and hope that in the long view, everything will turn out okay. Maybe they will. But it seems to me that the American public is rightly losing patience with this crew - and that itself will affect the war. Patience is essential to pulling through. But is it at all reasonable to expect the American public to be patient with an arrogant, dismissive incompetent like Rumsfeld? There are limits to what human nature can accomplish. If the president wants the country to hang in there, he needs to replace his defense secretary - preferably with a tough-minded Democrat. If Iraq needs a national unity government to get through the next three years, then America needs a least a little bit of one itself. Over to you, Mr Bush. Are you serious about winning this war? Or are you still winging it?

(Photo: Samir Mizban/AP)

Here's an interesting critique of "Misquoting Jesus."

How to keep the tax cuts and reduce government to match 'em. Well, it's much more specific than my wish list.

They're on the march. In Georgia, there's a bid to ban the sale of anything that even tastes like marijuana. I'm not talking about candy that actually gets you high. I'm talking about candy that has no THC but merely tastes like pot:

"This dope candy, I believe, is a gateway product to other drugs," said Fort, who has spearheaded the effort to have it outlawed in Georgia. If Fort's bill were to become law, selling the marijuana-flavored candy would be a misdemeanor on the first offense. A second offense would be a felony punishable by up to five years in prison - which is comparable to the punishment for selling real marijuana.

These puritans are out of their tiny minds. But you knew that already, didn't you?
(Hat tip: Demmons.)

Kevin Drum has challenged me to detail how I'd balance budgets while keeping Bush's tax cuts. (A small clarification: I'd keep the estate tax as it once was; and I'd add a buck to the gas tax pronto.) I'd prefer experts like Brian Riedl or Veronique de Rugy to propose detailed cuts. But my back-of-the-envelope wish-list is that I'd repeal the Medicare drug entitlement, abolish ear-marks, institute a line-item veto, pass a balanced budget amendment, means-test social security benefits, index them to prices rather than wages, extend the retirement age to 72 (and have it regularly extended as life-spans lengthen), abolish agricultural subsidies, end corporate welfare, legalize marijuana and tax it, and eliminate all tax loopholes and deductions, including the mortgage deduction, (I'd keep the charitable deduction). For good measure, I'd get rid of the NEA and the Education Department. I'm not an economist, so I do not know whether this would do the trick entirely, and I'm open to debate on any of the particulars. But you get my drift. Maybe someone out there could do the math. I'm also fascinated by Charles Murray's new proposal to abolish the entire welfare state and replace it with with cash grants to individuals. I look forward to conservatives continuing to insist I'm a lefty. I also look forward to ferocious opposition from the left. But the bottom line is that the middle class and the prosperous elderly are far too pampered by government in this country. They need to get rid of their debilitating and unaffordable dependency.

An update on a fascinating and revealing moment in Noam Chomsky's deplorable career.

This is a wonderful quote from an Afghan judge about a man who faces the death penalty because of his conversion to Christianity:

"We will invite him again because the religion of Islam is one of tolerance. We will ask him if he has changed his mind. If so we will forgive him."

There are many Muslims in the West and elsewhere who do not support or tolerate this kind of medieval oppression. I look forward to hearing their protests. Please let me know of any I might have missed.

He's a fascinating character, and this blog discussed him here and here. He's the former fundamentalist who became an agnostic after studying the various textual sources for the Bible. Here's a 40 minute interview with him on NPR's usually great "Fresh Air".

A reader writes:

"Your blood-and-thunder, hateful tirades against our commander-in-chief in time of war and at a vulnerable point IN that war has at last marked a watershed in your 'evolution' from long-ago conservative to current leftist-in-just-about-everything-name [sic].
Your language, your attitude and your position have finally placed you pretty firmly in the camp of Michael Moore, Alec Baldwin and the Hollyweird left in general.
It confirms my 'bigotry' from the get-go: Gays cannot sacrifice enough of their sexual self-interest to adhere to an ideology as austere as conservatism. The pull to the left is too strong for homosexuals to resist for very long. So formalize and render legit your new political 'awakening': declare conservatism behind you.
There is a long, proud history of betrayal in the homosexual community, whose most celebrated example - the locus classicus, if you prefer - is Philby and his crew.
Congratulations on joining that fine tradition!"

So let's recap: I'm in favor of Bush's tax cuts, but want spending cuts to match them; I favor balanced budgets; I favored and favor the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns, but want to execute them competently, with enough troops, and in adherence to America's long tradition of humane warfare; I oppose affirmative action and hate crime laws; I favor privatizing social security; I opposed the Medicare prescription drug entitlement; I want more money for defense, specifically more troops; I favor states' rights; I'm a First Amendment nut; I have few problems with gun rights; I would criminalize third trimester abortions; I support marriage rights for everyone, because marriage is a critical institution fostering self-reliance and responsibility. And all of this now makes me part of the "left," equatable with individuals who betrayed their own country for Stalin's Russia. I notice that my correspondent describes conservatism as an "ideology." I think that speaks volumes about what has happened to what was once regarded as the antidote to ideology.

The Republicans have just raised the debt limit to $9 trillion. The president's incompetence has led us into a very difficult time in Iraq. They have few substantive proposals to offer the public. So what are they going to do to stop a Democratic landslide this November? Yes, you guessed it: another bout of hysteria around the terribly dangerous prospect of gay couples settling down and committing to each other. Fred Barnes lets us know what's coming down the pike. No worries, Fred. We know by now what we're going to be dealing with. It happens like clockwork every summer before an election year. I remember the first time, back in 1996. But each time, it gets a little staler, doesn't it? The bigotry gets a little more obvious - and the threadbare nature of what's left of the conservative movement a little bit starker.  But hang in there. You can maybe squeeze a few more votes out of it. And, by this time, you certainly know how. Joe Gandelman rounds up bloggy reax here.

The great conundrum of the stoner is the inevitable existential tension between the marijuana and the munchies. But in this almost-free country of ours, someone found a way to combine the two: cannabis candy. Yes, according to the Smoking Gun, an enterprising crew created marijuana-based candy bars: the products "carried labels such as Toka-Cola, Pot Tarts, Puff-A-Mint Pattie, Stoney Ranchers, Munchy Way, and Buddahfinger." Here's a visual sample from TSG:

Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman again takes a pot-shot at your lowly blogger today. I won't link, because the NYT has him behind a fire-wall. But allow me to explain two claims of his that evaporate upon inspection. We begin with this:

"Mr. Bush's new conservative critics don't say much about the issue that most disturbs the public, the quagmire in Iraq. That's not surprising. Commentators who acted as cheerleaders in the run-up to war, and in many cases questioned the patriotism of those of us who were skeptical, can't criticize the decision to start this war without facing up to their own complicity in that decision.
Nor, after years of insisting that things were going well in Iraq and denouncing anyone who said otherwise, is it easy for them to criticize Mr. Bush's almost surreal bungling of the war. (William Kristol of The Weekly Standard is the exception; he says that we never made a "serious effort" in Iraq, which will come as news to the soldiers.)"

It will come as some surprise to my readers that I have not been criticizing Mr Bush's conduct of the Iraq war. The plain record shows that I have been criticizing it since the first week it was launched. My disdain for Bush's conduct for the war even led me to endorse John Kerry, something Bill Kristol didn't. I criticized the conduct of the war before many other conservatives; and have done so with much more gusto. Readers will also be surprised to find that I have not owned up to "my complicity" in the decision to go to war. I specifically did so in explicit terms. Does expressing personal "shame and sorrow" not count? Then there's this:

They can't even criticize Mr. Bush for the systematic dishonesty of his budgets. For one thing, that dishonesty has been apparent for five years. More than that, some prominent conservative commentators actually celebrated the administration's dishonesty. In 2001 Time.com blogger Andrew Sullivan, writing in The New Republic, conceded that Mr. Bush wasn't truthful about his economic policies. But Mr. Sullivan approved of the deception: "Bush has to obfuscate his real goals of reducing spending with the smokescreen of 'compassionate conservatism.'" As Berkeley's Brad DeLong puts it on his blog, conservatives knew that Mr. Bush was lying about the budget, but they thought they were in on the con.

But Krugman is grotesquely misrepresenting me. My delusion in 2001 was that Bush was actually a conservative. I thought "compassionate conservatism" meant unleashing private armies of compassion and this emphasis on the voluntary sector would soothe and distract liberals who would otherwise demagogue cuts in public spending. I was obviously wrong - in retrospect laughably so. So as soon as I realized that I had been conned, I started complaining about the Bush spending increases - earlier and more insistently than many other conservatives. Here's something I wrote ten months into the Bush administration:

"If Clinton was an Eisenhower Republican, Bush looks increasingly like a Nixon liberal in domestic economic policy. The Nixonian gambit of buying public support for the war by reckless, pro-corporate Keynesianism at home is a sobering precedent, and could wreck Republican credibility on the economy in the months and years ahead."

To imply, as Krugman does, that I once supported the budget chicanery and suddenly now don't is patently dishonest. I just wanted to reduce government power and spending and thought Bush did too. Boy, was I wrong. And boy, do I deserve a shellacking for that early misjudgment. But I recognized it as soon as the fall of 2001; and my campaign against spending has been consistent thereafter; and I backed Kerry in protest. And I'm the conservative Krugman picks on?

There is a reason for this. It's important for the left to knee-cap conservative critics of this administration in order to discredit conservatism as a whole by conflating it with the Bush debacle. That's what these smears against Bartlett and me are about. Krugman's gambit, of course, is to deny the facts of a massive explosion in spending under Bush. He's stuck because he hates Bush but loves the spending. And so he decides to smear not those conservatives who went along for the ride; but those conservatives who got it right sooner than many. If he can discredit us, then his ideology advances. And that, rather than intellectual honesty, is what he cares about and what he represents. I'm sorry I have to respond  in such detail. But Krugman is published by the New York Times; and he is engaged in character assassination, based on lies. I'm not Michael Dukakis.

"There are many in America today who have little sympathy with those we torture and torment. They are our enemies, they say. They would do worse to us if the situation was reversed. Maybe so. But those young men and women who we have turned into torturers and inquisitors, they were soldiers once. What are they now?" - Jay Elias, Daily Kos.

Dick Cheney said Sunday that Iraq is not in a civil war. I just got more pessimistic. Meanwhile Don "Stuff Happens" Rumsfeld has said withdrawing from Iraq would be like handing post-war Germany back to the Nazis. How many allied troops were there in Germany in 1946? What was the ratio of allied troops to German civilians? Just asking ...

An always-shrewd reader writes:

"Here's a question: this weekend Fox's Beltway Boys helpfully explained how the Dems need this to be a "referendum election," and that the GOP is determined to make it a "choice election."  OK, so far so good.
So how does the censure talk cut?  If you happened to see Bill Kristol on Fox News Sunday today, he had a contrary view on this. He seemed to think that all the censure talk ultimately hurts the GOP because, over time, it starts to seem less radical. He should know: in 1998 he played a key role in moving the Lewinsky story from Drudge to ABC's This Week when he forced it on the air during a now infamous round-table appearance.
Once it became OK to talk about, well, it started to seem less radical, less fringe-like. It became just another mainstream question. Everyone had to declare either for or against, and then defend their position.
Now, censure will never happen because it lacks the votes. We all know that. As an actual outcome it is a nonstarter.
Still, let's take a hypothetical congressional election: two candidates get asked in a town-hall meeting about censure. Even if both the Republican and the Democratic candidate declare that they are not in favor of censure, the Republican is still obliged to frame his answer as at least a partial defense of the President, while the Democrat can sound moderate by declining to endorse censure while still offering a strong critique of Bush. That sounds a lot like "referendum election" to me.
My first reaction to Feingold was that it was bad politics. But now I'm not so sure. Kristol may be on to something.."

My paper led Sunday morning with an impeachment story by Sarah Baxter. Maybe the meme has legs; and I should reconsider, as my reader has, the wisdom of Feingold's move.

In the genre of romantic drama, "Brokeback Mountain" is now the eighth-biggest earning movie of the last quarter century. It may soon beat "Out of Africa." 'The Bridges of Madison County" comes in at # 13. "Romeo and Juliet" is at # 23.

Update: several readers have emailed to say that Box Office Mojo doesn't adjust for inflation. D'oh! When it is, Brokeback slips.

Reaganite Bruce Bartlett writes:

"I disagree with your characterization of Bush as being famously loyal — a view so widely stated that you can be excused for repeating it. Bush is loyal ONLY to toadies, suck-ups and sycophants. Anyone who shows an ounce of independence — or loyalty to the country above loyalty to him — is punished or dispensed with.  You mention Paul O'Neill, but a better example is Larry Lindsey. His estimate of the cost of the war was mildly embarrassing back in 2002 because it was higher than the absurdly low estimates being peddled by the White House at that time.  So they threw him overboard, even though he may have done more to get Bush elected than anyone else, including Karl Rove. Now, as you know, Lindsey's estimate looks absurdly low. As I say in my book, loyalty with Bush is strictly a one-way street: total loyalty is demanded, but none is ever really offered in return.

Given that this is the case, I have never understood why so many people — both inside and outside the administration — continue to give Bush so much loyalty.  I can only conclude that it is borne more from fear than agreement with his policies. I think there is genuine fear of crossing the president, although I have never been able to uncover the precise mechanism through which it is communicated — even in my own case. Nevertheless, it is real — just as fear of the unknown is real. I think somehow he communicates to everyone he comes in contact with that they will suffer if they go against him. And his obsessiveness about leaks — combined with Patriot Act powers — has shut off back channels that have previously existed in every presidency.

There is a CRYING NEED for an investigative reporter to plumb the depths of how this works and why so many people submit to it — even when Bush has poll ratings so low as to barely show a pulse. Even behind closed doors, with guarantees of confidentiality, I cannot get FORMER administration people to say a bad word about the guy even when they have been badly treated by him in some way. The climate of fear is pervasive."

Part of this may be due to the fact that Bush is personally a nice guy. Many people like him too much to tell him what a shambles his presidency has become to his face. An alternative theory to explain the mystifying deference and persistent fear is that the Bush presidency is based on religious adherence, not political judgment. Karl Rove has accelerated the transformation of the GOP from a party of limited government and individual liberty to one of Christianist fundamentalism and big government largess. The party is now essentially a religious grouping with some business interests glommed on for the ride - and a retinue of sleazeballs and lobbyists gleefully in the rear. If your career is related to that party, then any criticism of the president, regardless of the grounds for that criticism, is deemed indistinguishable from congregants taking on a fundamentalist pastor. It's forbidden. You will be cast out of the church. His authority is rooted in his faith; to question it is to question religious authority.

The key element that binds Christianism with Bush Republicanism is fealty to patriarchal leadership. That's the institutional structure of the churches that are now the Republican base; and it's only natural that the fundamentalist psyche, which is rooted in obedience and reverence for the inerrant pastor, should be transferred to the presidency. That's why I think Bush's ratings won't go much below 25 percent; because 25 percent is about the proportion of the electorate that is fundamentalist and supports Bush for religious rather than political reasons. They are immune to empirical argument, because their thought-structure is not empirical; it is dogmatic. If the facts overwhelm them, they will simply argue that the "liberal media" is lying. Bruce poignantly thinks the GOP is still the secular, empirical, skeptical party it once was. It's not: it's a fundamentalist church with some huge bribes for business interests on the side, leveraged by massive debts. So all criticism is disloyalty; and disloyalty is heresy. The facts don't matter. Obey the pastor. Or be damned.

Just how physically and mentally exhausted is Bush's staff? Are they sleepwalking through a second term? My take here.

(Photo: Kevin Dietsch/UPI/Landov.)

Juan Cole attempts a limited defense/elaboration of Iraqi Ayatollah Sistani's call for executing gays "in the worst, most severe way of killing." Cole's post is, as so often, learned, informative and revealing. But he seems caught between his commitment to defend Islam against the West, and his reluctant recognition that, with respect to gay people, Islam is barbaric, when it isn't grotesquely sexist. So Cole tries a third option: he blames all this on what he regards as the misguided attempt to get rid of Saddam. Ah: Saddam. The pomo-left's last great hope for Arabia.

Here's a document from Vietnam setting out clear guidelines for humane treatment of any and all military detainees by U.S. soldiers:

Under Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, that has now changed. Here's the new mantra:

"The reality is, there were no rules there," a Pentagon official told the New York Times about "Camp NAMA," an acronym for "Nasty-Ass Military Area" . The troops doing the abuse and torturing were not reservists on the night shift. They were an elite group either doing what their civilian masters wanted; or beyond their civilian masters' control. Fire Rumsfeld.

It's heating up. Keep the pressure coming. Matt Stone and Trey Parker have had a great relationship with Comedy Central for many years, and this kind of censorship decision is made at the Viacom level. If the censorship continues, should South Park tell Viacom where to shove it? Blogger Typical Joe says, with new technology, they can. Here's a Slate piece that offers some alternatives to big media; and another on alternative forms of distribution. Meanwhile, even in Britain, Tom Cruise might have increasing trouble threatening lawsuits. Since Viacom doesn't have the chocolate salty balls to show it, watch the episode online here. Tom Cruise cannot stop that. Yet.

"During a recent visit to Baghdad, I saw an enormous failure. On the part of our media. The reality in the streets, day after day, bore little resemblance to the sensational claims of civil war and disaster in the headlines." - Ralph Peters, who has accused other members of the media of lying about the situation in Iraq.

"It is unfortunate that we are in civil war. We are losing each day as an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more. If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is." - Ayad Allawi, former Iraqi prime minister.

Allawi has an ax to grind. The truth may be somewhere in between. But Peters' rosy view of Iraq is so out of kilter with every other report I read, including that of Iraqi bloggers, that I'd say Allawi is closer to the mark. Alas.

We're going to have to change the nickname for the Republicans. The Grand Old Christianist Party keeps moving further and further toward a complete conflation of church and state and a massive increase in government power, spending and soon, taxation. Mike Huckabee is the latest to reflect the trend; as does the astonishing number of Republican candidates who back the South Dakota law criminalizing all abortions, regardless even of rape, incest or the health of the mother. I should make it clear that I'm not referring to many Christians of sincere faith who vote for both parties. I mean those Christianists who believe that their sectarian views should be imposed by law on those who disagree with them and hold a different faith, or even different version of Christianity. I mean those Christians who specifically disavow Jesus' insistence that God and Caesar be clearly separated - while insisting that everyone else be governed by the literal word of God.

A plurality of voters finally figure out what George Bush really is. Pity it's a year and a half too late.

Another one joins the chorus. Rummy's still in denial about troop levels. The man would much rather lose a war than concede a point. Until he is fired, any confidence we can muster in the conduct of the occupation has to be compromised.

"I had not recollected that footnote. I will -- I will find it. I don't read footnotes, normally," - Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia.

A reader writes to someone else for a change:

"Dear Viacom,
I am outraged that religious extremists have caused you to not air the "Trapped in the Closet" episode of South Park. Scientologists and Tom Cruise intimidating Viacom like some radical Islamic cleric makes me lose all respect for your company. I will boycott everything but South Park and The Daily Show/Colbert Report that is owned by Viacom and am urging others to do the same.
Don't knuckle under to religious extremism, especially from dopey Scientolologists. The word is being spread far and wide about your cowardice. It is already the talk of every major blog from the Drudge Report to Andrew Sullivan. com. I wonder what Jon Stewart and your good friend Howard Stern is going to say about it?
Wake up and cut your losses. Air "Trapped in the Closet" next week unedited or at a minimum we will keep spreading the word about what a bunch of chickens*** weenies you are. This is becoming the hottest story on the Internet, and is going to become even bigger in the next few weeks."

Email Viacom using the address press@viacom.com. Email Comedy Central using this page. Put "Protect Freedom of Speech" in the contents line. Don't even think about seeing "Mission Impossible: 3". Keep these cowards on their toes.

It appears that the acronym for the torture site set up by the U.S. military in Iraq, and continued even past the abu Ghraib revelations, means: "Nasty-Ass Military Area." According to this email, it was "named by a general." Somehow, I don't think Rumsfeld's military will discipline him.